Maximum PC netbooks RSS Feed

ASUS Announces All Eee PCs Will Switch to ION Platform

Ryan Whitwam — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 20:17:16 -0600

Asus is about to make a big change to their Eee PC line of products. The netbook pioneer has announced that all their future Eee PCs will come equipped with Nvidia ION instead of the slower Intel solution most netbooks and nettops use now. Nvidia claims that ION is ten times faster than Intel’s integrated solution.

ION is famous for being capable of outputting 1080p video without using much power. The ION platform is also able to run Aero cleanly on Windows 7. “These PCs will run circles around most Atom-based systems, so they are an excellent solution,” said Industry analyst Jon Peddie. With the upcoming Flash 10.1 supporting video acceleration, you can expect smooth flash video at long last.

In Test Windows 7 Netbooks Take Battery Life Hit

Ryan Whitwam — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 21:06:24 -0600

A new round of testing by Laptop Magazine indicates that battery life on Windows 7 may not be all it’s cracked up to be. Microsoft claimed that their new OS would result in better battery performance on some netbooks. The testing, however, says otherwise.

Three netbooks were tested: the Toshiba mini NB205, ASUS Eee PC 1008HA, and the HP Mini 311. On average, the computers ran down 47 minutes sooner with Windows 7 than with XP. Still, two of the units were running after nearly five hours, and the Toshiba made it nearly nine hours on Windows 7. It may not be the same as losing nearly an hour on a conventional laptop, but it is something to consider. If you plan to buy a netbook, will you be hunting for one running Windows XP?

Video: Kohjinsha Dual-display Netbook Prototype in Action

Ryan Whitwam — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 20:42:12 -0500

If you’ve ever tried to get any amount of real work done on a netbook, you know how frustrating it can be. One of the biggest barriers to regular netbook use is the undersized low-resolution LCD they come equipped with. In a recent demo at CEATEC Japan, Kohjinsha showed off their prototype dual screen netbook. In what was probably the biggest shocker of the show, it actually looks good.

When closed, the Kohjinsha netbook looks like any 10.1 inch unit. It doesn’t even look terribly bulky. In the video we can see a smooth sliding mechanism at work that folds out the displays symmetrically. This little beauty sports an AMD Athlon NeoMV-40 CPU running at 1.6Ghz, 4GB of RAM, and Microsoft Windows 7. No word on how badly battery life suffers due to the dual displays.

No exact release date or pricing info was available, but Kohjinsha expects to be offering the dual screen netbook late this year for less than 100,000 Yen (slightly under $1100). If this were available, would you pay more than $1000 for it?

Acer Confident it Will Achieve Sales Goals of 40 Million in 2010

Ryan Whitwam — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 20:25:41 -0500

PC vender Acer is on quite the roll as of late. They’ve finally become number two in worldwide notebook sales, beating out Dell. Now they expect to be able to ship 40 million notebooks in 2010, and take the number one spot from market leader HP.

Earlier this year Acer was predicting only 33 to 37 million units shipped, but better than expected performance in the second half of the year caused them to raise expectations. One of Acer’s major problems is the ongoing shortage of hardware, including optical drives, LCD panels, hard drives, and graphics chips. Acer Chairman, JT Wang, indicated that even with possible shortages the company would likely reach its goal.

Acer has become a major player in the last few years. Their notebook shipments have more than doubled, mostly due to the success of netbooks marketed heavily to consumers. They plan to continue on this path into next year.

Intel Atom N470 Will Allow Double the Memory of Most Other Netbooks

Ryan Whitwam — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 21:30:26 -0500

There’s very little to differentiate one netbook from another these days. Manufacturers are basically just putting different enclosures around the same hardware. That’s largely a result of restrictions placed on netbook specs by Intel and Microsoft. With the upcoming Atom N470 (Pineview), the spec requirements will be lifted a bit, but they’ll still be there.

Currently, netbooks are limited to 1GB of RAM in most instances. When the N470 is released around March 2010 that limit will be raised to 2GB. Manufacturers will also be able to include a 32GB solid state drive if they so choose. Intel boldly pointed out that they could totally put Intel’s Moblin OS on them too… no pressure though.

While it’s nice to see some movement here, is it anywhere near enough? Don’t most users that want more RAM just add it anyway? So, good news, or just plain depressing?

Michael Dell Doesn't Think You'll Be a Lasting Netbook Convert After 36 Hours of Usage

Ryan Whitwam — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 20:15:11 -0500

Michael Dell had some harsh words for netbooks in a recent speech. He claimed that a user might like a netbook just fine, until they’ve used it. “About 36 hours later, they're saying 'The screen's gonna have to go. Give me my 15-inch screen back,’” said Dell. He claimed that consumers really prefer higher end machines in the long run.

Of Windows 7 Dell said, “Performance is kind of coming back.” This may have been a well masked condemnation of Vista’s inability to run acceptably on netbooks. Clearly, he would prefer you buy a more expensive computer, but according to Dell’s CEO, 80% of their business doesn’t come from individual consumers anyway. He pointed out that this dynamic meant Dell could bounce back from the slowdown quickly.

The next time you’re about to buy that cheap netbook, just take a second. Think about what Michael Dell would like you to do: spend more money. He’s probably just saying it because he’s concerned for your user experience, right?

Maximum PC Primer: Lightweight Netbook Computing with Linux

Will Kraft — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 23:00:00 -0500

These days, netbooks have become a very popular alternative to conventional notebooks for mobile computing. Netbooks are lightweight, have great battery life, and are relatively inexpensive compared to full-sized notebooks. This makes them ideal for students or people on a budget. Of course, the lower cost and extended battery life does not come without a trade-off—many netbooks have lower system specs as well, which means that they are not designed for heavy-computing applications.

Although many netbooks now run Windows XP because of Microsoft's hurried entry into that market, many earlier models were built to run Linux. (For instance, the Asus Eee 700 Series ran Xandros, and the current models are offered with either Linux or Windows) And although most current netbooks are x86-based (running the Intel Atom CPU), the usage of ARM-based CPU chips is likely to increase in the future since ARM offers far superior energy efficiency over x86 and battery life has always been a major factor in mobile computing. ARM chips have been used successfully for some time in smartphones and music players, including the newest Zune HD. Since ARM is a different CPU architecture than x86, Windows will not work on ARM. Earlier this year, Microsoft's Steve Guggenheim said that the company currently has no plans to port Windows 7 to the ARM architecture. Therefore, any new wave of ARM-based netbooks will run Linux once again. Unlike Windows, most Linux distros can be compiled for ARM if you have the requisite skills for doing so.

Linux is an ideal choice for netbooks for multiple reasons in addition to CPU architecture. Netbooks generally have lower specs than most full-size notebooks (not to mention desktops) so they are ideal for lightweight applications like web browsing, document preparation, etc. Linux does these tasks very well without the bloat that Windows systems have to deal with from anti-malware utilities. This primer will help you set up and optimize Linux for your netbook.

The Operating System

While any Linux distro will work for your netbook with some degree of success, it is better to use one that is explicitly designed for that purpose. Many specialized distros (optimized for a specific hardware configuration) have sprung up for models like the Acer Aspire One, The Asus Eee, and several others while more generalized distros exist for all netbooks. Most netbook distros are based on Ubuntu, since Ubuntu is very well developed and has enjoyed unparalleled success on more conventional systems.

The first distro we should address is Ubuntu Netbook Remix, which is a trimmed-down variant of Ubuntu designed for netbooks. It is compatible with most netbooks makes and models on both x86 and ARM architecture. (mainline Ubuntu support for ARM is coming soon)

Easy Peasy is another Ubuntu-derived distro that ships with a few proprietary applications. (Skype instead of Ekiga)

Crunchbang is a scaled-down variant of Ubuntu that is especially good since it packs in plenty of software and has a very small memory footprint compared to standard Ubuntu. Crunchbang uses the OpenBox window manager; like on Fluxbox, most activity is done through right-clicking.

Eeebuntu is an Ubuntu derivative that has been designed specifically for the Asus EEE. Unlike Ubuntu Netbook Remix, Easy Peasy, CrunchBang, and Eeebuntu only support x86 at this time.

Standard Xubuntu is also a good choice for low-spec systems, including netbooks.

If you prefer a lightweight distro that is not based on Ubuntu, Slax is also an excellent choice to use on a netbook due to its small footprint; memory usage is seldom over 256 MB at any given time, so you will experience minimal swapping. (in fact, you can run Slax entirely in RAM—just watch your memory usage while doing so!) Based on conventional Slackware, Slax offers a nice slimmed-down KDE 3.5 and a nice modular package management design if you need to add more stuff.

Instead of the heavy OpenOffice.org office suite, Slax includes parts of the Koffice suite: Kword (not to be confused with kwrite, a lightweight text editor) Kspread, and Kpresent. These are excellent lightweight alternatives to OpenOffice.org, but are not practical for most lightweight netbook distros since you have to install most of KDE to make them work. However, they work quite well in this situation since KDE is already included in the distro.

Media is also handled quite well with Juk and Kplayer handling audio and video, respectively. However, you may want to add a more powerful player like VLC that can do both. This is not as painful as it sounds, since you can easily custom-build your own Slax remix by using a rather unique tool before you even download it. If you choose to build your own Slax, just keep your netbook's limitations in mind and don't get too carried away with adding packages since having more applications create a heavier system.

Although Slax is designed as a pure LiveCD distro like Knoppix, it is possible to install it. The process involves copying the Slax files to your netbook's hard drive and running the bootinst.sh script in Slax's /boot folder. If you run into snags while installing Slax, there are online guides that can help you get things sorted out. Once you install Slax, you may have to do some tinkering (installing firmware or ndiswrapper) to make certain wireless devices and webcams work properly. Also, you may need to make sure that your bootloader is configured correctly.

If you really want to go lightweight, you should check out Damn Small Linux. This miniature 50MB operating system packs in a full Linux experience in a footprint that is about as tiny as a full-featured Linux distro can get these days. DSL is a Live CD distro but can also be installed in accordance with the same precautions as Slax. In both cases, preparing Slax and DSL for netbook use is best left to more experienced users rather than beginners.

Conventional full-size distros like Debian and Mandriva have been known to work well on Netbooks as well. If you go that route, try to keep a small installation and memory footprint to minimize the burden on your system.

Regardless of the operating system you use, a major priority should be to reduce disk activity, especially swapping. (swap is the Linux equivalent to the Windows paging file) On solid state disks, swapping is actually detrimental; SSDs have a finite number of “writes” before they begin to lose data integrity and swapping is a very write-intensive process. The number of write cycles may range anywhere between 100,000 to five million writes. This may sound like a lot, (especially on USB flash drives that don't get written to very often) but it really isn't if you use your netbook on a regular basis. Therefore, it is imperative that you minimize swapping as much as possible to avoid artificially shortening the life of your SSD. If you disable swapping altogether, your system will spontaneously crash if you run out of memory, so it is best to set aside only a small permanent buffer of swap space to keep this from happening. (additional swap can be added at a moment’s notice through swap files) With that said, you can also use Linux successfully without any type of swap at all if you keep a vigilant eye on your RAM usage at all times.

This situation does not apply to the few netbooks that use conventional hard drives; since there is no finite number of writes with that technology, you are able to swap normally to your heart's content. However, excessive disk activity can drain the battery rather quickly whereas RAM usage does not, so it still pays to run as much of the system in memory as possible.

Preparing the Operating System

Since many netbooks lack optical drives, the usual method of downloading an ISO of your favorite distro and burning it to a CD/DVD to create the installation medium will not work. Instead, the best choice is to use a USB flash drive as your installation media. Since the ISO can't be “burned” to a USB stick the same way it can be burned to a disk, you will need to convert it.

UNetbootin is a nice utility for Windows and Linux that can take a conventional ISO image and install it to a USB flash drive. Alternatively, it can download and prepare a distro for you automatically. Once this has been done, you will be able to boot from the flash drive and install the operating system as you normally would. Using a flash drive has the added bonus of being more efficient; since you can overwrite the contents of the flash drive as needed, you won't eventually end up with a big pile of obsolete installation discs.

Lightweight Starter Software

Since the best course of action is to stay within the confines of your netbook's physical memory regardless of the type of disk you are using, it is best to use lightweight applications that have a smaller disk and memory footprint. Regardless of the hard drive type used, most netbooks have a fairly low amount of disk space compared to full-size notebooks or desktops. For instance, most models have an 8GB or 16GB SSD or a 160GB hard drive, which isn't very big compared to the 500 GB and 1TB (or larger) drives found on today's desktops and some high-end notebooks. Likewise, many netbooks have only 512 MB to 1GB memory. Therefore, it is best to regard your netbook as simply being a low-power system, much like an older computer. Because of this, it is often essential to use lightweight software that works well on such systems.

Choosing the right desktop environment can be a huge factor in the performance of your netbook. Conventional desktops like GNOME or KDE may overtax the system (unless they have been modified to be more lightweight than the standard build) and leave little free memory left for other applications. Most of the Ubuntu-based netbook operating systems like Easy Peasy, Ubuntu Netbook Remix, and Eeebuntu have a simplified launcher system that is easier to read and navigate on small compact screens. This special launcher has large icons and a tabbed interface system that turns the entire desktop into a program selection menu. The rationale behind this design is that display space is a premium on small netbook displays and it is pointless to waste most of the desktop space on a wallpaper image while forcing the user to navigate small menus.

If you prefer a more conventional interface, lightweight desktop environments like XFCE (used by Xubuntu) and LXDE (used by Knoppix 6 and one variant of EeeBuntu) are ideal for netbook systems and low-spec systems in general. Fluxbox and similar window managers also fit the netbook niche very well.

Smaller, lighter applications can often get the job done just as well as heavier ones. Since netbooks are frequently used as a companion to more powerful computers, you should load them with only as much software as you really need on a regular basis. For instance, many people only need a word processor and perhaps a spreadsheet for day-to-day use. Therefore, it makes sense to install only a word processor and spreadsheet as standalone programs if you only need those things instead of carrying around a full office suite that has things you may not need regularly (like presentation, drawing, and database software).

Abiword is an ideal lightweight word processor that supports OpenDocument Text, Word 2007, “classic” Microsoft Word DOC format, and much more. Its interface greatly resembles that of OpenOffice Writer or pre-2007 MS Word, so users familiar with those programs should not have a difficult time using Abiword. Abiword has passive (red underline) and active spellcheck. In addition to that, Abiword has a passive grammar check option, (suspected grammar errors are underlined in green) a feature that Writer lacks altogether. GNUmeric is a standalone spreadsheet that has some resemblance to Excel. It can import/write many different spreadsheet formats and even has support for graphs.

For more information on running Linux and lightweight computing, refer to our previous guides on the topic.

Ballmer Shares his Thoughts on Browsers and Operating Systems

Ryan Whitwam — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 21:21:55 -0500

Steve Ballmer recently sat down with Techcrunch to wax philosophical about browsers and their connection to the operating system. Ballmer was asked about the legal disputes over Internet Explorer bundling. Without missing a beat, he called the notion that operating systems can be independent of internet access “not a sensible concept”.

Ballmer went on to take a few swings at the upcoming Chrome OS, saying, “If you remember, [Marc Andreessen] said something like, Windows will just be a poorly debugged set of device drivers running Netscape… Now, that’s kind of basically the attitude expressed in Chrome Browser, Chrome OS.” He also called Chrome’s browser market share a “rounding error”, but noted that Firefox is having a real impact. Ouch for Chrome.

When asked about how Microsoft will fare against the continued onslaught of competitors, he answered like he’d been thinking about it a lot. Ballmer explained that Macs attack from the top of the market, and PC sales have gained a bit on Macs in the last year as people shied away from more expensive options. He went on to say that Netbooks were going to continue to be a big part of the Windows strategy.

Ballmer clearly lays out a world in which competitors are sometimes operating systems, sometimes browsers, and in the future may even be both. Even with all these new threats, he seems pretty sure Microsoft will stay on top. What do you think?